Cut to the Bone (Body Farm 8)

Wiping the blood from my thigh with the damp towel, I blotted the wound with tissue, then applied a thin line of super glue to the edges of the skin and pressed them together. The glue — cyanoacrylate, said the label, which also warned that the chemical was a carcinogen — burned my nostrils and stung like a sonofabitch. Serves you right, I heard a voice in my head sniping. But whether it was the dead girl’s voice or my own this time, I didn’t know.

CHAPTER 14

Satterfield

“Your first time is special.” People said it about all kinds of shit, Satterfield reflected, and maybe it was true — maybe every first was special. First kiss. First love. First killing.

Its specialness to Satterfield wasn’t the way he’d done it; in truth, he’d done it clumsily, and far too swiftly. Its specialness lay in the fact that he had done it. The killing had been spontaneous — as surprising to him as it was to her — but it had been an epiphany, a life-changing revelation.

Three years had passed, but the images of it remained vivid. Indeed, the more times he replayed them, the more vivid they grew.

She was small and pretty — half Jap, half round eye, with a slender, finely chiseled face and thick, red-black hair. Satterfield saw her dancing in one of the skin bars near the base, and he liked what he saw. Before he knew it, he’d dropped fifty bucks on overpriced, watered-down drinks, and then another fifty on a lap dance that left him wild with want. “Can we go somewhere?” he begged when she sat down beside him, her thigh pressing against his. “Can you take the rest of the night off? Or even just take a break and come outside with me?”

She laughed. “You want some private time with me? VIP room.” She pointed a glossy red nail — her pinky finger — toward an unmarked black door set into a black wall. “Hundred dollars. Ten minutes.”

He stared at her. “A hundred bucks? For ten minutes? That’s robbery!”

She smiled coyly. “That not what other men say.” She stood up and began undulating in time to the music, backing slowly away from his table, her face mirroring the lust that was coursing through him. A Marine at a neighboring table turned his chair toward her and slid another chair, an empty, in her direction. She glanced at the chair and then looked at Satterfield, smiling and cocking her head inquiringly.

He could stand it no more. Scrambling to his feet, he seized her by the wrist and pulled her close. “Three hundred,” he said, “if you meet me in the parking lot in ten minutes.”

* * *

The girl hooked her thumbs through the elastic of her G-string and shimmied out of it, then lay back on the rear seat of his car, raised her arms over her head, and opened her knees.

Satterfield stared. Her body was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen — far more beautiful than anything in the skin magazines his stepfather kept in the sleeper cab of the semi. Beneath the red-orange glow of the streetlight filtering through the car’s tinted glass, her skin shone like molten copper. Her muscled legs testified to the strength and grace that hours of dancing each night had created. Her belly — flat when she was standing — was concave now that she lay on her back, and the strands of the golden tassel that hung from the piercing in her navel fanned out in the same way her hair fanned on the leather upholstery behind her head. “Okay, sailor boy,” she said, fingering one of her nipple rings, “show me.”

Satterfield was unmanned. Inside, when she’d been seductive but unavailable, he’d been about to explode. Now, though — the teasing done, replaced by a command to perform — he felt himself beginning to panic, to sweat, and to shrink. Mortified, he began rubbing his crotch, slowly at first, then with increasing desperation and fury.

She raised herself onto her elbows. “What? You not want me? Why you act like you want me, if you not want me?” Her eyes flitted from his face to his crotch and back up again. “You never been with woman, sailor boy?” Her lips curled into a smile — a smirking, scornful smile. “You scared, sailor boy? You a sissy, sailor boy? You wet bed at night, sailor boy?”

He was on her in an instant, delivering a backhanded slap, then a forehand slap. She opened her mouth to scream, but he clamped one hand over her mouth, and clamped the other around her throat. Her eyes bugging wide, she thrashed and bucked beneath him, but she was no match for him, and gradually her struggles lessened. He removed the hand from her mouth and loosened his grip on her throat. She gasped like a drowning victim surfacing from underwater; he allowed her a few sips of air, then bore down on her neck again. Her eyes were desperate and pleading now, and he felt himself growing aroused.

His orgasm came when her eyes rolled back in her head.

* * *

He was interrogated by the local cops but he was never charged. Nobody’d seen her leave with him, and she’d been seen doing lap dances for a lot of men around the time she went missing.

The military police had their suspicions, too — just routine lead checking at first, but then, once the bone detective got involved, they’d zeroed in on Satterfield. In the end, the Navy chose not to court-martial him, but it also chose not to keep him in its ranks. There’s the right kind of killing and the wrong kind of killing; the kind that solves problems, and the kind that creates them.

Two years after enlisting — two years after he walked away from his mother and his stepfather and finally embarked on what felt like a life of power and prestige — Satterfield found himself unmoored. Two years of basic training and special-forces training were shot. His two-week career as a SEAL — two weeks of training, before he’d been washed out — was memorialized in a tattoo on his right forearm. He’d gotten the tat the day he’d heard he’d been accepted for SEAL training — a moment of overconfidence or of hope or even of gratitude. He’d gotten the celebratory tattoo that afternoon, then gone to the strip club that night.

Administrative discharge, “under circumstances other than honorable,” with nothing to show but the tat. It made him a decorated veteran in his own ironic way. By the end of his military service, he’d acquired skills in stealth, survival, and attack — with bare hands, knife, pistol, rifle, even explosives.

He’d also acquired even more valuable things: insight and self-knowledge, which he’d gained in those moments when he first tasted the fruit of the tree of power — the power unleashed by the convergence of pain, sex, and fear. Especially fear.

Last but not least, he’d acquired a new nemesis: the man who’d focused the Navy investigator’s suspicions on Satterfield. The man who’d ruined the life Satterfield had finally, against all odds, begun to create for himself.

The man whose reciprocal, retaliatory ruination Satterfield had come to Tennessee to set in motion.

CHAPTER 15

Brockton

“Art department.” The female voice in my ear sounded young, alert, and amused, as if she’d heard the punch line of a joke just before she picked up the phone.

“Good morning,” I said. “This is Dr. Brockton, in Anthropology. Is Dr. Hollingsworth in?”

“Dr. Hollingsworth?” There was a puzzled pause, followed by a suppressed snort of laughter. “Oh, you mean Joe?”

Flustered, I glanced at the campus directory again. Art Department: Chair, Joseph Hollingsworth. I’d probably met him at some faculty function or other, but if I had, I didn’t remember. “He — Joe — he’s the department chairman, right?”

“Right,” she said, her amusement tinged with sarcasm now. Joe’s department, I gathered, marched — or boogied? — to a different, hipper drummer than mine.

I backed up to take another run at it. “So. Joe — my main man, Joe — is he around?”

She wasn’t buying. “One moment, Dr. Brockton. I’ll see if Dr. Hollingsworth is available.” Ouch, man, I thought as the receiver clicked me onto hold.

A moment later, it clicked again and the call was transferred. “Hel-lo, this is Joe,” a cheery voice singsonged.

“Good morning,” I said. “This is Dr. — ” I halted, my formality sounding stuffy now even to

me. “Sorry. Joe, this is Bill Brockton, over in Anthropology?”

“Yessir, Mr. Bill. What can I do you for?”

“I’m looking for somebody who’s good at portraits. Nothing fancy; just a sketch, really. Pencil or pen is okay; color or black and white. What matters is that the artist has a good feel for anatomy, musculature, facial features. I need something realistic, not…,” I hesitated, “not like Picasso, you know?”

“I think I get your drift,” he said. “Thing is, ’bout everybody over here thinks even Picasso is old school, you know what I mean?” I suspected I did; I’d walked through the cavernous atrium of the Art and Architecture building a time or two, and I could make neither heads nor tails of most of the abstract paintings and sculpture on display. “Sounds like what you need,” he went on, “is one of those guys that draws tourists at the beach, you know? Pay him five bucks, and five minutes later, he hands you a pretty decent caricature of yourself.”

“Hmm,” I mused. The nearest beach was eight hours away. “Well, but I don’t want something cartoonish. Like I said, I need something realistic. Serious, too.”

“Let’s back up a little,” he said. “A portrait, you said. Who’s the subject?”

“I don’t know.”

“Come again?”

“I don’t know who it is,” I repeated. “That’s the problem. Here’s the thing, Joe. I’ve got a dead girl’s skull in my lab. Thirteen, fourteen years old. Her bones were found at an old strip mine up near the Kentucky border. She’s been dead a while; we’re talking years, not months. I’d like to find somebody who could look at that girl’s skull — see it through the eyes of an artist — and then sketch what that girl may have looked like when she was alive.”